by James Gunn
And others went on with their own lives, pursuing their own visions of catastrophe.
11:45 p.m. Vulcanologists have had a great deal to watch recently. Old volcanoes in Hawaii, Mexico, Italy, Iceland, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Chile, and Japan have erupted or shown signs of imminent activity, and new volcanoes have opened smoking fissures. So far none has demonstrated the destructiveness of Mt. St. Helens and El Chichon in 1983, but vulcanologists do not rule out that possibility. One or more eruptions the equal of Krakatau in 1883 or Tambora in 1815 might inject enough ash and smoke into the atmosphere to rival the nuclear winter predicted by many scientists in the 1980s to follow a nuclear war.
11:47 p.m. On the balcony Krebs listened to her earphone and then looked quickly at the ballroom floor. “He's leaving,” she said.
“Who's leaving?” Gentry asked.
“The President. As if he's in a hurry. One of the Secret Service men ran over to him and spoke a word or two—nobody could pick up what was said—and he's almost running out of here."
Gentry shrugged. “It probably doesn't mean anything. Maybe he doesn't want to get caught in the midnight crush."
She made a face at him. “You're supposed to be the realist."
“Are you ready then for my realism?"
She looked at him for a moment without speaking, and then she said, “If you were anybody else, I might say ‘Yes,’ and to hell with the job. But if the world survives I'm going back to the Midwest and find a more meaningful way of life, and you, for all your above-it-all earnest cynicism, you use people—you use life itself—for your own selfish satisfactions."
He seemed speechless for the first time that night, and then he said, without his customary condescension, “Do you think I don't know that? My cynicism doesn't come out of superiority, but out of fear. I'm afraid. I've always been afraid."
“Maybe so,” she said, “but you'll have to live with it like everybody else. I've got to go. I've been told there's something happening on the roof top."
11:50 p.m. Astronomers today announced the discovery of a new comet that promises to be larger and brighter than Halley's comet. The comet, as yet unnamed, may be making its first pass through the solar system, possibly disturbed in its billions of years’ orbit in what is known as the Oorts Cloud by a distant companion sun to Sol called by some scientists “Nemesis.” Preliminary calculations indicate that the new comet may pass close to earth, but alarmist reports of a possible collision have been dismissed by scientists as “next to impossible."
11:52 p.m. Smith-Ng looked up from the dessert table in the restaurant on the second balcony. “What did you say?” he asked Lyle, who still tagged along behind him.
“The President. He's gone. What does that mean?"
“Maybe nothing,” Smith-Ng said, wiping a glob of whipped cream from his upper lip. “Maybe catastrophe."
“Shouldn't we—couldn't we—find some place quieter? More alone?” Lyle's teeth made an uncontrollable chattering sound, and he put his hand on Smith-Ng's shoulder as if he were steadying himself.
Smith-Ng looked at Lyle and then toward the ceiling as if seeking guidance. He placed his hand tentatively over Lyle's. His face approached the young man's as if moved by some external power, and he kissed him with the curiosity and then the intensity of an unsuspected passion he had just discovered. He drew back as if he could feel his world shattering in pieces around him and shook himself. “I understand that something interesting is happening on the roof,” he said shakily. “Perhaps we should go find out what it is."
11:54 p.m. On the eve of the Twenty-First Century the United Nations Office of Population announced that the world's population has passed six billion. Of these six billion, it said, more than half were undernourished and one billion were actually starving. These figures, a spokesman said, raise serious questions for world peace as well as for the number of deaths by starvation and disease if world population doubles again, as predicted, in the next thirty-five years.
11:56 p.m. By the time the cameras arrived, the audience had swollen to fill all the chairs and the standing room that surrounded them. Krebs with Gentry behind her had reached the terrace just a few moments earlier, and Smith-Ng and his disciple were only a few steps behind.
The terrace had rippled minutes ago with the news of the President's hurried departure, but now it was quiet with the hushed expectancy of something momentous about to happen, as if by listening hard one could hear the last grains of sand trickling through the hourglass of the universe.
In the ballroom five floors below, the crowd was frantic in its effort to greet the new millennium with life and laughter, like savages at the dawn of civilization trying to frighten away disaster with noise or appease it with celebration. Below Saturnalia was in progress. Here on the roof top a congregation as solemn as that of any true believers awaiting the day of judgment on mountain top was contemplating the eternal.
People were here because of who they were, choosing this kind of celebration rather than other kinds below, because of the occasion and its star-reaching site, and because of Barbara Shepherd. She stood now like a sacrificial virgin, her hymen restored with her faith, her arms outstretched, her hands clenched into fists, her voice lifted in exultation.
“Now has the moment come,” she said, “the time arrived, the stroke of the clock about to sound as we listen. Now we must demonstrate our faith or lose all faith forever and be forever damned. Faith can save us yet. Faith will save us. Have faith! Have faith!"
“I'm frightened!” Hays said to Landis.
“What are you frightened of?” he asked gently, tightening his arm around her as if to create a fortress for two.
“Everything,” she said. “The world ending. The night exploding. Bombs. Change. Everything."
“Don't be afraid,” he said. “Maybe we found each other too late, your sense of the drama of life and my search for its purpose. But if we make it through this night, I have a suggestion: let's create a new world, for ourselves and whoever wants to join us."
“I'd like that,” she said. “If we make it through."
“I'm frightened, too,” he said. “But it's not catastrophe I'm afraid of. What I fear is our love of catastrophe."
Barbara Shepherd turned and ran toward the back of the platform like the acrobat she once had been. As she reached the middle, she did a flip backward, landed on her feet, and flipped again. The second took her off the end of the platform. For an instant she seemed to disappear from view. Then her figure reappeared, propelled upward with surprising speed, head high and facing the audience with the composed features and confidence of a saint, rising, rising, clearing the railing that surrounded the roof top and floating free in the air beyond it. Her gown fluttered; her arms reached out and, like wings, seemed to support her body in the crystalline air, even to lift it toward the heaven she addressed.
The audience waited, shocked into immobility, shocked out of skepticism, expecting miracles and fearing them, fearing catastrophes and expecting them.
But as the stroke of midnight sounded and maddened noise broke out in the city below and in the ballroom behind like celebration or like explosions and machine guns and the screams and drying cries of victims, and the spinning world seemed to hesitate in anticipation of catastrophe, the figure of Barbara Shepherd faltered in the air before it fell, with growing velocity, glittering, through the night.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by James E. Gunn
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by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-2938-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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